Students’ academic achievement is related to various factors. While extensive research has examined students’ confidence and perceived difficulty in mathematics, relatively few studies have comprehensively examined the associations between school climate and student achievement in mathematics within a multilevel framework. This study aims to investigate the associations between school climate-related factors and students’ mathematics achievement using multilevel structural equation modeling. This study used U.S. data from the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and analyzed 7589 eighth-grade students across 235 schools, focusing on nine school climate-related factors. The student-level factors were school belonging and safety, mathematics class climate, and bullying, while the school-level factors were mathematics resources, school discipline and safety, teacher characteristics, parental characteristics, student characteristics, and school support. The intraclass correlation coefficients for mathematics scores ranged from 0.340 to 0.351, indicating the importance of school-level factors. This study found that, at the student level, school belonging and safety and mathematics class climate were positively associated with students’ mathematics achievement, whereas bullying was negatively associated with both mathematics achievement and the aforementioned factors. At the school level, shortages of resources and school discipline and safety were negatively associated with students’ mathematics achievement. The findings highlight the importance of school safety, classroom climates, bullying prevention, and resources for mathematics in school.
Lee et al. (Wed,) studied this question.